


Faith

by fadagaski



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Angst with a Happy Ending, Christmas, Depression, Gen, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-01
Updated: 2021-01-01
Packaged: 2021-03-10 17:20:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,575
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28480791
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fadagaski/pseuds/fadagaski
Summary: Drunk and alone for his first exiled Christmas, with his broken fairy lights and wilted tree, Booker receives a phone call.
Relationships: andy & booker
Comments: 18
Kudos: 54
Collections: The Old Guard Gift Exchange 2020





	Faith

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Gamebird](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gamebird/gifts).



> Ignores the "6 months later: Quynh!" scene.

Booker feels the coming of the holidays like an ache in his bones, a rattle in the chest, incipient arthritis and tuberculosis too: deep under the skin where his healing can’t reach. 

He stocks his dingy flat with enough cheap American whisky to make shares in Jack Daniels a worthy investment, and then picks up bread and eggs on Christmas Eve to last him through a whole week - longer, if he drinks too much to eat. For the past two hundred years, it’s been his go-to attitude for any Yuletide that the team hasn’t been working. Just him and Andy holed up somewhere, avoiding the happy families making happy memories, even managing to avoid Nicky and Joe some years, though that came with its own particular downsides. 

Goddamnit, he even misses Joe’s mournful eyes, the way he gets so sad and pathetic-looking until Booker can’t help but snort out a reluctant laugh. 

Christmas morning in Paris dawns cloudy and therefore milder than Booker remembers. His breath mists the air. He was too drunk-hot to turn on the heating last night, and when he flops a hand next to his pillow, he finds the empty bottle that put him under. 

Sitting up is agonising in the way that only a mental difficulty can be: he chokes and groans and grumbles, but there’s no snide comment from Joe calling him an old man, no whimsical little dare from Nicky that Booker can get to the kitchen for coffee without swearing, “Ten Euros, Booker, easy bet.” 

There’s no Andy sat in an armchair watching them with fond eyes bruised like rainclouds from lack of sleep. 

Booker makes it to the kitchen without swearing, as he does every Christmas he spends with the whole team, but there’s no coffee to greet him - made with a splash of cream liqueur, Nicky’s present to him - and no crisp note to slide into his wallet. 

The temptation to grab a new bottle of whisky is almost overwhelming, but he wrestles it down, makes French toast because the perversity of stereotype has always darkly amused him. Then he sits at his rickety table, on the one dining chair he owns, and eats off his only plate with his only fork, and drinks doctored coffee like he’s civilised. 

From this angle, he’s looking at the scrawny little fir tree he picked up for virtually nothing at the market. It was destined for the dump, bare of limb and lopsided too. The vendor accepted Booker’s pocket change for it. Now it sits in his window overlooking the grey Parisian view, and a bit of water has done jack shit for it. Maybe a whisky would be better. Maybe that would just kill it off. Maybe that would be the merciful thing to do anyway. 

He washes his one plate, one frying pan, one fork, one mug. In yet a further sign of his mental breakdown, of which he is fully cognisant, yesterday he hung up a string of fairy lights around the window over the sink. Half of the bulbs twinkle with a hypnotic rhythm; he can’t help staring at them, drawn like a moth. The other half of the bulbs are utterly dead. Not surprising that he found this hanging forgotten, looped like a wreath and left on some garbage bags set out for collection. 

They’re more depressing than he thought they would be: half-working, the only decoration in the miserable flat but for the wilting tree. Booker unplugs them with wet hands and tells himself he’s relieved he didn’t feel a spark. 

After that, he gets his bottle, sits at the table and drinks until the world is soft, fuzzy at the edges, a well-loved blanket rather than an iron maiden designed to make him bleed. 

The rest of the day passes in a haze. Booker comes to with his head on the table and the empty bottle still clenched in his hand, the last pool of gold shimmering at its base. He can hear a muffled vibration. 

Buzz buzz. 

Buzz buzz. 

Buzz buzz. 

Shit. Shit fuck shit. 

The chair clatters to the floor and, bottle forgotten in his hand, he _crawls_ to the bed where he left his phone. Fuck fuck fuck. He hits Accept without even looking; either it’s some telemarketer who is about to get their asshole torn out, or it’s - it’s - 

“Hey Book,” comes a voice he didn’t dare to hope for. 

“Andy,” he chokes out. His eyes sting like needles. 

“How’re you doing?” 

“Me? What about you? Are you okay?” 

And, like a Christmas gift to his ears, Andy laughs. She’s outside somewhere - he can hear her boots on pavement, voices indistinct near her, passing cars. 

“I’m doing great, actually,” she says. She sounds surprised by it. “I’ve been enjoying the holiday.” 

Booker has to swallow twice before he can speak. “You hate this holiday.” 

She laughs again. Booker sucks in a breath to steady himself. 

“It’s not so bad,” she says. “And I’ve always liked the eggnog.” 

“Except -” 

“Except Ottawa 1924, yeah. Goddamn, will none of you let me forget that?” But he can hear the smile in her voice. “Anyway, I just wanted to call and see how you’re doing.” 

Fuck. How is he doing? His body has healed up the hangover from the last bottle but he can still smell it on him where it’s sweated out of his pores, soaking into his clothes. 

“I got a tree,” he says. And then hiccups a kind of laughing sob before he stuffs his fist in his mouth. 

“Oh Book.” Andy’s breath sighs down the line. “Did you at least decorate it?” 

Booker clears his throat. “No point. It’s dying.” 

There is a long, long pause, and the horror yawns like a bottomless chasm in his chest. 

“Jesus, Andy, I’m - I’m sorry - I didn’t mean - Fuck -” 

“Hey!” she barks. “Enough of that, you hear me? It’s okay, Book. It’s okay.” 

Booker twists the cap on the bottle one handed and knocks back the last gold dregs. He’s too practised an alcoholic for it to give him any liquid courage anymore, but at least he feels the familiar warmth tracing a path through his wretched core. 

Wherever Andy is, someone is honking their car horn. “You drinking the good stuff?” she asks, louder over the noise. 

“Ha. No. Wasted on me.” 

“Fuck, Booker, hang on.” The phone goes silent though the call is still connected. Booker stares at the screen, watches as the seconds tick by. He doesn’t want to lose this gossamer thread tying him to a family almost entirely out of reach. Silently he wills Andy to come back on the line, so fervent it’s closer to prayer. _Please, Andy, my lodestar, forsake me not in my hour of need._

The longer the time drags, the wetter his cheeks grow, but Booker doesn’t even dare blink. 

Will it be like this every holiday? Andy somewhere out in the world with Nile and Joe and Nicky, learning to appreciate the joys of Christmas not because of any trite Christian folklore but because of how few seasons she’s got left to enjoy things like family and celebration and home. Will Booker spend every holiday clutching his phone, praying to Andy _in absentia_ for a word of comfort? 

Will there be one year when it’s Joe or Nicky or Nile who make the call, because Andy can’t? 

Will there be one year when the phone doesn’t ring at all? 

“Booker?” Andy sounds out of breath, but Booker is wheezing with his forehead pressed to his pillow, tears and snot a wet mess over his face, heartbeat thumping in his ears. “Book, I’m here.” 

“God, Andy,” he stutters. “I thought -” 

“No, Booker, you’re not hearing me.” There’s a thump-thump at his door. “I’m here.” 

Booker sits bolt upright, staring at the front door through blurry eyes, his fingers gone numb where they’re gripping the phone. 

“What -” he starts. 

“Fuck’s sake, Booker.” This time the door vibrates where a boot has definitely kicked it. “Open the goddamn door.” 

Booker stumbles to his feet with none of the dexterity Andy has trained into him over the decades, slams his hip into the table and ricochets off the wall before he hits the door, scrabbling at the locks one handed, the other holding the phone in a death-grip, and he can hear Andy’s laughter through the phone but he can also hear it _through the door_. 

And then he wrenches the door open, and there she is. 

Andy smiles at him, bright as sunshine. “Hey Book.” 

Booker goes to his knees, marionette with his strings cut, goes to his knees and holds his hands up, afraid to touch because if this isn’t real, if she isn’t really here, he doesn’t want to know, doesn’t want the confirmation that reality is bleak and brutal and merciless, wants the fiction of this - just this - just - 

Andy steps into his reach, wraps her arms around his head and pulls him into her, and oh God, she’s real. That’s her warmth and her scent and her her her. Booker digs his fingers into the back of her coat, grinds his forehead into the meat of her belly, can’t breathe for how each inhale is a dry choking sob. 

“How? How? I don’t - How?” 

Her fingers scratch through his hair, too rough to be anything but visceral, says in a hoarse voice, “Told you to have faith, Book.”

**Author's Note:**

> Happy holidays to Gamebird and to all a good night!


End file.
